Books & Ideas is the English-language mirror website of La Vie des Idées, a free online journal which has gained a large readership and established itself in France as a major place for intellectual debate since 2007.
Contemporary uses of the word “Muslim” in France illustrate the variety of ways in which minorities identify themselves. In a book that straddles semantics and ethnography, Marie-Claire Willems sheds light on the diversity of forms of belonging available to populations exposed to exclusion.
Michel Crozier’s work was shaped by the conviction that organizational phenomena create society. He helped pioneer the tools for analyzing groups established to carry out a common project according to a specific system of action and rules of the game.
Katharina Pistor has renewed the critique of economic inequality by showing how the institutions of private law form the lock of an unequal economic and social system.
The encounter between British miners and gay and lesbian activists during the strikes of 1984-85 was explored in the celebrated film Pride. A historian looks back at this memorable period and reveals the continuities between the two movements.
What economic impacts and consequences did conversion carry in early modern Rome? The history of an elite Jewish family offers revelations about Jewish conversions to Catholicism and the shifts in social status that followed baptism.
About: Guillaume Alonge & Olivier Christin, Adam et Eve, le paradis, la viande et les légumes, Anacharsis
About: Samuel Moyn, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, Yale University Press
About: Antoine Grandjean, Métaphysiques de l’expérience. Empirisme et philosophie transcendantale selon Kant, Vrin
The EU aims for net climate neutrality by 2050, utilizing the Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) as its main tool. But the climate crisis demands more than market mechanisms. It requires comprehensive planning and legal frameworks that prioritize public over private interests.
Jane Mansbridge has made a major contribution to political theory. She has spent her life combining empirical research with a theoretical approach, and has played a vital role in developing the critique of rational choice and the study of democracy as a permanent process continually in flux.
Rorty made conversation a philosophical genre in its own right, which led him to reject any distinctions he considered futile: between analytic and continental philosophy, between the Enlightenment and postmodernity, between philosophy and literature.
How do images respond to political events and how do they shape them ? What is the political power of images ? Should images of violence be shown in the media ? Through its winter selection, Books&Ideas offers to rediscover a group of four essays and reviews, all published in 2015, which have tackled these questions through the prism of history, philosophy, aesthetics and political sciences.
A selection of five essays and reviews recently published in Books&Ideas discusses the legacy and renewal of social class studies in France, Great-Britain and India.
Books & Ideas is going on holiday for the summer, and will resume its publication schedule in September. In the meantime, we present you with a weekly roundup of our most recent essays and reviews. Our second summer selection features portraits of prominent intellectual figures: Albert Camus, René Dumont, Ronald Dworkin, Joan W. Scott and Max Weber.
Although now considered a pseudo-science, phrenology was tremendously successful in its Victorian heyday. Tracing the intellectual and scientific journey of George Combe, the ’science’s most prominent promoter in Great Britain, this paper addresses the phrenologists’ little-known contribution to the ’social question’ debate of the day, and the ambiguities of their social gospel.
According to Nancy Fraser, the renewal of socialism requires a conflation of activism and political theory; indeed, emancipation can only exist on the basis of equal participation in all spheres of life, and can only be understood in terms of social struggles, which today appear in multiple forms.
Entre les 15 et 31 janvier 2025, les agriculteurs sont appelés à voter pour leurs représentants syndicaux au sein des Chambres d’agriculture. S’ouvrant dans un climat de revendications et de défiance tous azimuts, ces élections professionnelles sont l’occasion de se pencher sur un malaise agricole aux multiples dimensions.
Les sociétés qui effacent leur passé en pensant par là éliminer leur culpabilité ne font que menacer leur avenir. Telle est la conviction d’O. Bartov, lui qui a cherché à reconstituer une histoire en première personne de l’Holocauste.
Le mouvement pour les droits civiques aux États-Unis est plus complexe que ce que le grand public en connaît. O. Mahéo en reconstitue la multiplicité discordante et marginalisée.
À propos de : Evanghelia Stead, Goethe’s Faust I Outlined. Moritz Retzsch’s Prints in Circulation, Brill
À propos de : Jean-Pascal Anfray, Descartes- More. Correspondance 1648-1655, Éliott
À propos de : Vincent Tiberj, La droitisation française. Mythe et réalités, Puf
